seven
and a half minutes at the first Wrestlemania pay-per-view; Hogan
would go on to reign

as
WWF world champion for over nine years, while Rich would be gone from
the WWF in less

than
six months.

After
leaving the WWF Rich would sign up with the AWA; he didn't win any
singles titles there

but
did enjoy two reigns as an AWA tag team champion, first as partners
with Bad News Allen

and
later as one half of the combo the Living Legends with Larry Zbyszko.
Harley Race would

earn
the ire of WWF fans in the mid-1980s as a part of manager Bobby “The
Brain” Heenan's

stable.
In 1990 the NWA would merge with Verne Gagne's American Wrestling
Association to

form
World Championship Wrestling(WCW); WCW would challenge the WWF for
supremacy

in
the wrestling business for at least another decade before it was
itself absored by the WWF

in
2001. The WWF would rename itself World Wrestling Enterprises(WWE) in
2004 to put an

end
to decades of being confused with the World Wildlife Fund and also to
reflect its growing

role
as a multimedia juggernaut.

******

In
reality, Race easily beat Rich in that May 1st
bout to win his fifth NWA world heavyweight

title.
Rich didn't compete in the WWF but did have a stint in the AWA as a
Southern tag team

champion
and Southern heavyweight champion. The AWA went out of business in
1991; the

NWA
took some serious blows to its prestige that same year when several
promoters pulled

out
of the company to form WCW and again in 1994 when a group of East
Coast promoters

quit
the NWA to establish ECW(Extreme Championship Wrestling), but
survived to re-emerge

after
the year 2000 as one of the largest and most profitable independent
wrestling organizations in the world. Tommy Rich continued to wrestle
at indy cards as late as 2010; Harley Race turned from active
competition in the 1990s to concentrate on managing champions like
Big Van Vader and doing TV commentary.